I took two and a half years of Japanese because I hated French and needed to fill out my course list. Even with French, I started off okay and understood the basics but soon as it came to anything complex or even simple sentence structure, I lost interest. I like Japanese as a language, it’s very pretty on paper and it sounds nice. I never planned to go until a family member offered to send us in exchange for pictures, as they’d never been.
I watched Lost in Translation with my parents at the movies in my early 20s, when you can kinda deal with going to the movies with your parents. I know my dad loved seeing Bill Murray nearly fall off an elliptical while screaming for help, I don’t recall if he liked the rest of the movie. I loved it and bought it on DVD, then got moderately obsessed with its aesthetic and atmosphere. I loved the sense of being in a hotel late at night when most people are sleeping and the halls are empty. The hotels I eventually stayed in, only one of them was nice with a decent sized room. (I avoided the capsule hotels, however Osaka and Tokyo the rooms were barely big enough for two. I wrote my own travel log, and I glossed over how I felt completely detached from the most spiritual moments, including walking into a temple and hearing chanting and feeling nothing, but the trouble is you can take me anywhere in the world, I’ll be too jetlagged and depressed to appreciate anything.
What I did do nonsensically was at least mentally defend this movie and I see in retrospect how misguided it was. The movie didn’t harp on too much about the language barrier, I know the title has a double meaning, but the weird contempt Murray has initially for the language, and later the condescension, when he’s in the hospital waiting for ScarJo, he kinda gets a comeuppance with the two ladies laughing behind his back while the skinny old guy talks to him. I don’t think Coppola is intentionally being offensive, she’s simply not bothered to do enough research into the language, she’s presented a very western perspective that perpetuates the myth of Japanese people reversing Rs and Ls. They don’t have L or V as common consonants so they’re replaced by R and B, it’s harder to pronounce any sound you’ve not been taught to use. (V and W tend to fight for supremacy in some languages, I’ve heard someone argue we don’t need W if we have U).
If you throw all that out, you have a decent love story that’s unique and reasonably touching. Once again, they’re basing this around two people in failing marriages that connect on mutual interests and circumstances and you accept they’re in love but unable to be together. Their respective partners aren’t as caring or understanding but they don’t leave them. Only Murray decides to sleep with the lounge singer, to ScarJo’s annoyance and he rightly calls her out on it. But they have sweet moments that are undercut by casual racism, so sadly this whole movie is tainted by cultural insensitivity. Murray is at least enough of a gentleman for it not to seem that sleazy he’s in love with a twenty-something woman, their chemistry is fantastic, without the stupid racism it really one of the best performances from Murray outside of the Wes Anderson fare, and I loved ScarJo as she was moving through her indie darling phase right before she reached mainstream success, so it sucked she never took the criticism she got for replacing Asian or trans actors in later roles. (Her saying she should be able to play a tree was as slippery a slope as you could get towards reintroducing blackface). She also wasn’t as pretentious, or at the very least she was hiding it better.
The film is so well put together on every other level it’s a shame it’s dragged down by this level of blatant racism, but then this was still acceptable comedy at that time. I also loved the soundtrack, and this was back when I had to rely on outside sources to get the songs, I was really into soundtrack music in the mid 2000s when I was spending hours compiling songs. I have weird memories attached to those songs, I even sat in my hotel room in Kyoto and listened to the one track called “Alone in Kyoto”, and posted a picture of my iPod as proof. I identified with ScarJo’s disaffected attitude even more after coming back from holiday and feeling worse. I want to appreciate this movie more but it’s rightfully not that worthy of all the praise it received.
